Description
Does information architecture have core values? Should it? What would those values be?
In recent years, ethics, inclusivity, and social responsibility have come to the fore as key issues in the information architecture, UX, and design fields. As practitioners, we want to uphold our ideals while balancing the demands of industry and the needs of diverse stakeholders. We are challenged to establish an identity for information architecture as a mature, ethical, and responsible field. This requires us to reflect, personally and collaboratively, upon the values that shape our practice.
Open to anyone with an interest in information architecture, the IA Roundtable is an annual event that aims to shape the discipline of information architecture by gathering practitioners, researchers, and educators to discuss critical aspects of our discipline and share what is discussed with the IA community. Join a dynamic collection of adventurers, thought leaders, and other curious folks for a lively, highly participatory roundtable.
This year’s IA Roundtable will focus on the topic of values in information architecture. We will use a short series of lightning talks and exercises to ground ourselves in relevant frameworks, perspectives, and experiences. The group will then work together to make sense of this topic and co-create shareable artifacts that support wider conversations about values in information architecture.
For those who want to take the results even further, we invite you to an informal strategy session and “make-a-thon” on the following day, Wednesday, April 15, from 9am to 2pm (exact times and location to be announced). Based on Tuesday’s Roundtable, we will create posters for the IA Conference Poster Night and discuss other ideas on how to extend conversations like this one into the world beyond the walls of the conference.
Join us and bring creative new ideas to life that you can develop, apply, and promote in your own practice! See http://iaroundtable.org for more details about this year’s topic, call for lightning talks, and the history of previous IA Roundtable events since 2013.
About the speakers
Stacy Surla has created and led workshops for government, industry, and the UX community for over 20 years. Drawing on her experiences as a performance artist, UX practitioner, and teacher, Stacy helps people transform meetings into more engaging and effective ways to get work done. Recent workshops include a bootcamp-style training for Lean UX delivery managers, a team-driven workshop for integrating UX into Agile, co-planning the annual IA Academic and Practitioners Roundtable, and a workshop on designing and facilitating workshops. As with all her work, she integrates design thinking, Lean UX, and user-centered methods to put people at the heart of each effort. Stacy is Vice President of MetaMetrics Inc., an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland iSchool, and was a twice-elected officer of the Information Architecture Institute.
Dan Zollman is an information architect and UX strategist living in Boston, MA. His interests in responsible, ethical, and systemic design have evolved through his experiences practicing IA and UX in complex organizations including Vanguard, Tufts University, and Massachusetts Digital Service. Dan is an organizer of the IA Roundtable (iaroundtable.org) at the IA Conference; World IA Day Boston; and an international online community for ethics in design and technology (ethicsofdesign.org), which was founded at the IA Summit in 2017.
An architect, teacher, and researcher, Andrea Resmini is the author of Pervasive Information Architecture and Reframing Information Architecture, and a two-times past president of the Information Architecture Institute. He co-founded the Journal of Information Architecture, Architecta, the Italian Society for Information Architecture, the Academic / Practitioner Roundtable, and World IA Day.
Andrea is a compulsive reader of WWII submarine warfare trivia, Tolkien drafts, and Jack the Ripper case studies. He is also one of the regular hosts of Acoustic Jam Night!
Sarah Rice is an information architect with over two decades of strategy and consulting experience, designing and executing excellent user experiences for companies such as Google, Sony, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, eBay, Princess Cruises and Yahoo!
She has a master’s degree in Information Science and consults with a number of user experience firms under Seneb Consulting. She served on the Board of Directors of the Information Architecture Institute, is active in the American Society for Information Science and Technology’s Information Architecture Summit. She also speaks regularly at industry conferences.